British Journal of Photography #7925

BJP 7925 / Ghost in the Machine

Taking Ghost in the Machine as its starting point, this issue examines photography as a technological system shaped by both human intention and machine logic. As artificial intelligence and automated vision become increasingly embedded in how images are produced and read, the issue asks what photography reveals – and what it obscures – when agency is shared between people and devices. Throughout, photography appears not as a neutral recorder, but as a medium marked by absence, distortion, and unease. Lisa Barnard’s You Only Look Once extends her research into automated seeing, constructing a disorienting encounter with perception itself, while Bharat Sikka’s Elephant in the Room uses a language model trained on his own archive to generate new images. Curating an exhibition on AI, Alison Weaver points to the uncanny gaps in understanding that persist even for those building the systems. Elsewhere, curators Max Gorbatskyi and Viktoria Bavykina explore how images function in the war in Ukraine, where drones, new media, and art are entwined in contemporary conflict. Alongside this, analogue photography resurfaces as a haunted counterpart. Åsa Johannesson and Johny Pitts both work with film, embracing imperfection, obsolescence, and inherited tools to expose photography’s lingering strangeness. Found images, archives, and studios under threat are revisited by Aikaterini Gegisian, Keisha Scarville, Rehaf Al Batniji and an anonymous artist from Iran, underscoring photography’s role in memory, testimony, and survival.